Monday, June 23, 2003
On Saturday, in honor
On Saturday, in honor of the beginning of summer, we engaged in waterborne recreation. Charles and Lori picked us up at 7:30 am for an invigorating drive up to the northern tip of the San Andreas fault. The fault can be clearly seen along much of its length, but nowhere, I think, to better advantage the Pt. Reyes peninsula, where the fault takes the form of a long, skinny finger of an ocean inlet, about a mile wide and running several miles inland, ocean water filling the chasm of the faultline itself. It’s so long and narrow, and ends in such an inconveniently isolated and marshy area, that this region, Tomales Bay, remains substantially uninhabited and undeveloped. It’s good for oysters, elk (a big herd lives on the western peninsula formed by the bay), and kayaking. Saturday, the latter was our choice.
Charles regaled us on our way in with stories of his recent experiences at a computer convention providing private VIP demos of the upcoming update to his computer game to luminaries such as Robin Williams ("he’s tiny, and he’s really really old") and Christina Aguillera (who apparently had brought someone along just to ignore stuff for her; her publicist he described as an “unsexy Jon Lovitz” who trailed two paces behind her all day long saying alternately, “thank you so much for everything you do” and “i’m sorry"). Charles can make the ingredients in your multivitamins both interesting and actually informative, so these stories were rollicking sagas that had us well entertained as we rolled though the gorgeous countryside.
We got to the kayak place just after 9 am, signed in, signed waivers, put on wetsuits and spray jackets and reef shoes and PDFs (personal flotation devices, which we’re told is the name for lifejackets now that they can’t call them that anymore because someone drowned while wearing one and the survivors sued the manufacturer). We rented four aesthetically and hydrodynamically challenged sit-on-tops with rudders and put in at a rocky strand of a muddy beach. We paddled out toward the mouth of the bay against both tide and wind. If we stopped paddling we immediately started drifting backwards. It was a perfect day and we all felt good. Too bad the kayaks were so clumsy and slow. Old women and junkies were zipping past us as if we were standing still. I felt like I was on the nautical equivalent of a Big Wheel - or maybe actually a Sit-n-Spin.
Regardless, the air smelled great, the trees and cliffs were deeply calming, the water felt great beneath me and wildlife abounded. We didn’t go far enough to see elk and didn’t have the oarpower to go into the deepwater central channel where the whitecaps were breaking, but there were plenty of pelicans and cool unidentified seabirds, an osprey, plus several bat rays and leopard sharks churning the shallows where we paddled. It’s quite a rush to look into the water next to you and see a dorsal fin, or the wingtips of a ray skimming along a yard apart next to you. You realize you’re not alone, and even though there’s no sense of threat whatsoever, it’s a sense of smallness and participation.
We turned around at noon and were back on the docks at 1, where Kel and Charles were first to get to the marina where we’d put in. In the ensuing hours the area had taken on a lot of water and was now a wide and deep mud flat into which they both instantly sank to their knees. Kel lost her shoes three times and kicked an enmired rock. Lori and I were warned off, paddled around to the other side of the marina and hauled out without incident. Everybody hosed down, cleaned up, toweled off and got dressed; we then had a lovely lunch at the Olema Farmhouse and I napped in the car coming back home. Welcome to summer. Let the games begin.
And on a note related only by county location and occurrance in continguous weeks, two weekends ago in San Rafael when we went to the streetpainting fair we parked next to a building that housed, according to the sign outside, the following businesses: “Cake Art”; “Diet Center”; “VirtuaLogic”; and “Oddfellows”. That’s the sort of thing that makes life worth living.